Even as faces a maturing smartphone market, this week's Mobile World Congress conference in Barcelona proves that chip maker remains one of the most important players in mobile. The San Diego-based company's latest premium mobile chipset, the Snapdragon 820, is powering all of this week's most important new high-end Android smartphones: Samsung Galaxy S7, Xiaomi Mi 5, LG G5, HP Elite X3 and the Experia.

Qualcomm's biggest win was getting back into Samsung's flagship phones. In last year's Samsung Galaxy S6 series of phones the South Korean electronics giant chose its own internally-developed processor, called Exynos. Qualcomm's chip at the time, the Snapdragon 810, was rushed into production and suffered from performance issues. There were rumors that Qualcomm's chip was prone to overheating. Losing Samsung, its biggest customer for its Snapdragon products, hit the company hard -- its stock is only now beginning to recover. This year, the 820 chipset will be inside the US, China and Japan versions of the S7 phones.

Qualcomm was also featured prominently in the launch event for Xiaomi's latest flagship phone, the Mi 5. At the the event, Xiaomi's head of international, Hugo Barra, spent time praising the new chip and he trotted out Qualcomm president Derek Aberle to discuss the partnership. The two companies had recently resolved negotiations over payments to Qualcomm for licenses related to 3G and 4G wireless technology.

HP had probably the most compelling idea out of all these new devices. The Elite x3 is HP's attempt at getting back into the mobile game with a Windows 10 phablet. The x3 comes with two accessories that basically turns the phone into a laptop or desktop computer with all the processing happening on the Qualcomm mobile chip.

The HP device could be viewed as Qualcomm moving more and more into PC territory, as the Qualcomm's new chip is nearly as powerful as Intel's offerings on these types of PCs. “For the first time, mobile chips can rival PC workloads,” Michael Park, the vice president and general manager of HP’s mobility division, told me in an interview.

Getting into these phones is a nice respite for Qualcomm after the bungled launch of last year's Snapdragon 810 chip. Qualcomm proved it can still build the best chips in the industry. The company is up to 100 design wins for the 820. But with the overall smartphone market experiencing noticeable slowdowns, winning phone designs is not enough anymore. The company's stock is up a bit (3% since last Friday) on the news this week coming out of MWC. The big question is how quickly the company can transition its silicon into a whole new breed of products, including drones, virtual reality headsets, cars and servers.